The decision to put Julian Assange in a cell over ludicrous sexual offence allegations is a politically motivated act that must be resisted. Assange has never been in hiding from the police, and there is no reason at all to believe he would abscond if granted bail.

This is kompromat – the use of sexual allegations to denigrate a person perceived as a threat to the state. They did it to Charles Parnell and Roger Casement and, a lowlier case, to me. This is an article I wrote on August 25:

The Russians call it Kompromat – the use by the state of sexual accusations to destroy a public figure. When I was attacked in this way by the government I worked for, Uzbek dissidents smiled at me, shook their heads and said “Kompromat”. They were used to it from the Soviet and Uzbek governments. They found it rather amusing to find that Western governments did it too.

Well, Julian Assange has been getting the bog standard Kompromat. I had imagined he would get something rather more spectacular, like being framed for murder and found hanging with an orange in his mouth. He deserves a better class of kompromat. If I am a whistleblower, then Julian is a veritable mighty pipe organ. Yet we just have the normal sex stuff, and very weak.

Bizarrely the offence for which Julian is wanted for questioning in Sweden was dropped from rape to sexual harassment, and then from sexual harassment to just harassment. The precise law in Swedish, as translated for me and other Sam Adams alumni by our colleague Major Frank Grevil, reads:

“He who lays hands on or by means of shooting from a firearm, throwing of stones, noise or in any other way harasses another person will be sentenced for harassment to fines or imprisonment for up to one year.”

So from rape to non-sexual something. Actually I rather like that law – if we had it here, I could have had Jack Straw locked up for a year.

Julian tells us that the first woman accuser and prime mover had worked in the Swedish Embassy in Washington DC and had been expelled from Cuba for anti-Cuban government activity, as well as the rather different persona of being a feminist lesbian who owns lesbian night clubs.

Scott Ritter and I are well known whistleblowers subsequently accused of sexual offences. A less well known whistleblower is James Cameron, another FCO employee. Almost simultaneous with my case, a number of the sexual allegations the FCO made against Cameron were identical even in wording to those the FCO initially threw at me.

Another fascinating point about kompromat is that being cleared of the allegations – as happens in virtually every case – doesn’t help, as the blackening of reputation has taken effect. In my own case I was formerly cleared of all allegations of both misconduct and gross misconduct, except for the Kafkaesque charge of having told defence witnesses of the existence of the allegations. The allegations were officially a state secret, even though it was the government who leaked them to the tabloids.

Yet, even to this day, the FCO has refused to acknowledge in public that I was in fact cleared of all charges. This is even true of the new government. A letter I wrote for my MP to pass to William Hague, complaining that the FCO was obscuring the fact that I was cleared on all charges, received a reply from a junior Conservative minister stating that the allegations were serious and had needed to be properly investigated – but still failing to acknowledge the result of the process. Nor has there been any official revelation of who originated these “serious allegations”.

Governments operate in the blackest of ways, especially when it comes to big war money and big oil money. I can see what they are doing to Julian Assange, I know what they did to me and others (another recent example – Brigadier Janis Karpinski was framed for shoplifting). In a very real sense, it makes little difference if they murdered David Kelly or terrified him into doing it himself. Telling the truth is hazardous in today’s Western political system.

There are a couple of things to add. The lead complainant is a serial crier of rape who made allegations against someone else which were found groundless, and has published a guide to sexual revenge over men. She consulted with the second complainant before the second complainant went to the police; these are not two unrelated complaints. The second one relates to a Swedish offence of not wearing a condom.

This from Danish WMD whistelblower – jailed for two years for whistleblowing – Major Frank Grevil:

Comparison of crime statistics between the three Scandinavian countries,

which have historically a highly similar societal structure, gives the

remarkable result that the incidence of sexual crimes is about ten times

higher in Sweden than in Denmark or Norway. Usually Sweden’s higher

proportion of unassimilated immigrants from first and foremost islamic

countries is blamed, but it would seem to be only a minor part of the

explanation. Rather, political instructions to the police seem to be the

major reason!

Critics maintain that Sweden has turned into a gynocracy, with some of the

In such an atmosphere of hate, the Swedish police has been instructed to put

all alleged crimes of even the most remotely sexual character under the

statistical heading “rape”. This includes consenting intercourse between

teenagers with the female part being slightly under-age. It also includes

consenting intercourse where the female part was drunk.

So whoever initiated the plot to go for Assange on Swedish sexual charges knew what they were doing.

I am not a fan of radical feminists. They are hate filled individuals whose very souls are ugly. They seem particularly fixated with causing trouble to political radicals. Anyone who knows the real story of the Tommy Sheridan debacle knows that. They succeeded in alienating me from the Stop the War movement

Game is up now. Best thing she can do is to try to get back to Sweden again. Back in Sweden it is the Judicial branch which will be under scrutiny. The PM said yesterday he does not want anything to do with it, probably realizing the mistake/set up. ON her web you find a Swedish PR bureau which has probabbly played a role in this case too. The case around the second girl is less clear for the moment.

@nobody, I am fairly sure we’ve had cordial discussions before, so the patronising ‘mate’ tag is unnecessary. Let us be civil – it makes the exchange much more pleasant.

Sure, I am well aware of google, and I regularly refer people to it. I’ll do that if you don’t have good links to hand. But you’ll know that finding a reasonable, well-researched story, that isn’t off the chart conspiracy-wise, and isn’t tainted with racist ideology, is much harder.

I am not of the view that the media largely does what it is told, incidentally (D-notices aside, of course). You’ll be aware of the Propaganda Model, and I find several of its components accords with my experience. I am particularly attracted to the idea that some progressive material does enter the mainstream in a very limited way, so that the system can be “proven” to be balanced – when of course it is anything but. If the cable releases can be said to be progressive in themselves – in the way the Pentagon Papers release was – then this is part of the 5% that gets through.

FWIW, I think Assange was naive to put Netanyahu up as a model of transparency. That said, Assange is not stupid, and I wonder if he was holding his nose, metaphorically, when he made these comments. As a conduit, he may take the view that he has a role to be strictly apolitical, so that the cables released by Wikileaks are not generally suspected as being politically selected or tampered with.

On Netanyahu being helpful to the peace process – well I despair of that view just as you do. Assange could again just be playing dumb for a media who’ll be scared off at the first sign of left-wing views. Or, Assange could be a right-wing libertarian; whilst I sense he was against the war in Iraq, he has specifically said he’s not anti-war, and some wars need to be fought. But even if he supports the most odious position vis-a-vis the occupation, that would not in itself invalidate the value of the leaks.

As an aside, since there are techies here. Anyone know of Eric Raymond, darling of the free software movement? Turns out he’s a far-right libertarian who championed on his blog the Israeli attacks on Gaza in 2008-2009, and regarded them as not going far enough. All to the cheers of a couple of hundred of post commenters at the time, cheering for blood, and steeped in racism. I had no idea until I read it, and it really took my breath away.

I do and he’s not their darling. He was opposed to software libre, pushing “open source” which is simply an appeal (cheaper, faster, more secure & stable) to companies’ bottom line to produce higher quality code whilst ignoring the lack of freedom engendered by refusing modification and scrutiny of the code.

This results in restrictive licenses and means the user is at the mercy of the developer, who can change their “open source” licenses at any time.

For example, IBM does a lot of development of GNU/Linux without condemning the idea of intellectual property – it is the largest holder of software patents.

Interesting, Anonymouse. I’m a programmer, a techie, and a supporter of the Linux/open source movement generally, but perhaps I’m not sufficiently aware of the distinctions between the various kinds of free software. IBM et al make a lot of source code donations because it benefits them to do so, as you say – but that need not necessarily be regarded as a bad thing.

I’m not sure about your point about changing licenses, since if a developer provides code to a project under license X, that developer is entitled to insist that the project or its derivatives remain licensed in the same way (even if more freedom is granted under the new license). Perhaps there are particular kinds of licenses for which this is possible?

Jesuz, Angry! You’ll do yourself a mischief getting so excited all the time. Of course Rudd made the statements in that article, but unless he was speaking entirely in a personal capacity, it’s bleedin’ obvious he had the support of the PM while doing so. Sheesh!

Are you still spluttering away indignantly, demanding to know why Assange would be worse off in Sweden compared to the UK, when it comes to handing him over to the Yanks, or have you decided to drop that one now?

*

‘nobody’ – I’m afraid you’re not quite correct in stating Assange is a universal hero to the media. Murdoch’s rags, for instance, have been well against it (The Times in particular, accuses Wikileaks and its media chums of putting lives at stake). A lot of Amerikan editorials, bloggers etc. have been calling for Assange’s assassination.

“Are you still spluttering away indignantly, demanding to know why Assange would be worse off in Sweden compared to the UK, when it comes to handing him over to the Yanks, or have you decided to drop that one now?”

Good point.

Glenn, how is it easier for Assange to be extradited from Sweden than it is to be extradited from the UK?

It seems that your theory is dependent on a good answer which is still not forthcoming.

Glenn: “Of course Rudd made the statements in that article, but unless he was speaking entirely in a personal capacity, it’s bleedin’ obvious he had the support of the PM while doing so. Sheesh!”

glenn, I’m afraid that angrysoba is correct about Rudd and Gillard. The leaks have been very embarrassing for the Australian Labor Party and for Rudd in particular. Also it was Gillard who deposed Rudd to become the new PM. There is a lot of bad blood between the two, and also a lot of arse covering going on since the leaks. Rudd is happy to sit on the fence regarding the WL issue and take a few pot shots at Gillard to make her look bad. It’s also Rudd’s only way to save any face, if he starts complaining about WL he looks even worse.

Scathing attacks on Rudd revealed in US diplomatic cables (theage.com.au/world/scathing-attacks-on-rudd-revealed-in-us-diplomatic-cables-20101207-18oc2.html)

The latest batch of WikiLeaks diplomatic cables revealed that Senator Arbib, a kingpin in the NSW Right (Labor), frequently briefed US embassy officials on the state of play in Australian politics. (theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/arbib-goes-quiet-but-many-are-talking-20101209-18rhy.html)

US DIPLOMATS closely followed the rise of Prime Minister Julia Gillard and predicted she would be the next prime minister more than eight months before she deposed Kevin Rudd as federal Labor leader. (theage.com.au/national/us-diplomats-monitored-the-progress-of-gillard-20101208-18ps4.html)

Mr Rudd told a group of visiting US congressmen, says he ”concluded by noting that the national security establishment in Australia was very pessimistic about the long-term prognosis for Afghanistan”.

Mr Rudd also told US politicians that ”he supported the Afghan war ‘from day one’ but confided that ‘Afghanistan scares the hell out of me’.” (theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/rudd-scared-as-hell-20101209-18ri5.html)

CheebaCow: Fair enough. I do believe Angry’s knee-jerk mission to discredit led him to snicker about his assumption that I’d mistaken Rudd to be the PM of Australia, though. And all the theatrical eye-rolling and so on that would apparently follow such a supposed howler.

All the same, this wide-eyed pretence, and mock eagerness for explanation, for why Sweden would be a better bet for extradition to the Yanks is typical enough. Why would a stooge like Angry spend so much time on the deluded idiot he claims to consider me to be? My word, a post can hardly go by without some snide comments these days. One would swear Angry had no time for such attention, consumed as he is with correspondence from contributors on his own high-volume blog!

Um, where did that quote come from? It came from a Time Magazine interview with him. Oh look, you found it. What was the question again?

And is ‘mate’ patronising? Not where I come from. Besides which I’d have thought that compared to my tone of voice it was neither here nor there. I vote we not get hung up on it.

And Jon what’s that you say? “I am not of the view that the media largely does what it is told.” I can understand you thinking this since the stories that the media refuses to touch aren’t real stories at all. Rather they’re crazy conspiracy theories and the media is in fact to be commended for never having looked into them or otherwise given them the time of day. Not apart from dismissing them sure enough.

And was I to mention any of them you would quite rightly roll your eyes, scoff, and call me a loony. Except perhaps for the attempted sinking of the USS Liberty.

In that particular chestnut, Israelis attempted to sink the USS Liberty with the loss of all hands (we know this because they deliberately machine-gunned all the lifeboats). The point of the exercise was to blame it on the Eyptians and have the US nuke Cairo. Believe it or not nuke laden skyhawks were launched and then recalled by LBJ and McNamara when they realised that the unimaginable had come true and the hapless Israelis failed to sink the most lightly armed boat in the US Navy. No need to take my word for it. Go to ussliberty.com where the survivors (who were all threatened with death if they spoke of it) are still to this day white hot with fury over their treatment. Or you can go to googlevideo and watch the BBC’s Dead In The Water and watch any number of key personnel describe what they saw.

Bet you never heard of that. I never had. Who knew that such things happened? The very idea: Israelis pretending to be Arabs and attacking the US in the hope they’d retaliate against Israel’s enemies. Wow.

And there we were in 911 bumping into Israelis at every turn we took: the ‘dancing israelis’ celebrating on the New Jersey shore; members of the Israeli company Odigo telling the NYT about warnings to get out of the building; Israeli Zim Shipping moving out of the WTC two weeks before 911 in spite of it costing them tens of thousands in fines; Ariel Sharon openly declaring that 911 would be good for Israel, in spite of all this never ever did the media consider for a minute the possibility that it might have been a false flag attack by a country has a precise history of it.

Since it wasn’t in the media we may safely assume that it was all just the imaginings of crazy conspiracy theorists.

So! Right you are Jon. The media is a square dealer and ipso facto Assange is everything they say he is.

PS I never declared Assange a media ‘hero’. I said he was a ‘superstar’. And he IS a superstar. He is bigger than the Beatles now.

“CheebaCow: Fair enough. I do believe Angry’s knee-jerk mission to discredit led him to snicker about his assumption that I’d mistaken Rudd to be the PM of Australia, though. And all the theatrical eye-rolling and so on that would apparently follow such a supposed howler.”

Well, then you’d be wrong as it was you who opened the sniping by trying to discredit my opinion that the Aussie PM threw Assange under the bus.

I stated opinion X and you were the one to mock and jeer.

“All the same, this wide-eyed pretence, and mock eagerness for explanation, for why Sweden would be a better bet for extradition to the Yanks is typical enough. Why would a stooge like Angry spend so much time on the deluded idiot he claims to consider me to be?”

I think it is a fair question. Why would it be easier to have Assange extradited from Sweden than from the UK?

I still haven’t been given an answer.

“My word, a post can hardly go by without some snide comments these days.”

Poor Glenn! As if you don’t make plenty of inept attempts to mock or smear me yourself. The difference is I don’t particularly care when you do it. You on the other hand seem to think there’s a conspiracy to discredit you thereby patting yourself on the back by making yourself believe you are some kind of dangerous dissident.

You’re not. Your ideas, such as they are, are ten-a-penny.

” One would swear Angry had no time for such attention, consumed as he is with correspondence from contributors on his own high-volume blog!”

Nobody: “Bet you never heard of that. I never had. Who knew that such things happened? The very idea: Israelis pretending to be Arabs and attacking the US in the hope they’d retaliate against Israel’s enemies. Wow.

…Since it wasn’t in the media we may safely assume that it was all just the imaginings of crazy conspiracy theorists.”

And he also says:

“Or you can go to googlevideo and watch the BBC’s Dead In The Water and watch any number of key personnel describe what they saw.”

So the “media” is hiding stuff. I saw it on the BBC!

Assange must be part of a plot because if he wasn’t the media wouldn’t print his leaks!

For example, if someone discovered, say, secret documents showing that the US was in Viet Nam without any hope of achieving its objectives and on a trumped up pretext, the newspapers would never print that, would they?

Just look at Scott Ritter! Nobody’s ever heard of Scott Ritter because he was never allowed on the telly. Apart from those ten or twenty times that he appeared on CNN to say he didn’t believe there were WMDs in Iraq.

Oh yeah, Webster Tarpley and Alex Jones says Julian Assange is a mind-controlled patsy. But everyone seems to write them off as “conspiracy theorists”. To call Alex Jones, a noble truth-teller, a conspiracy theorist is just the kind of way that Jew-run media in the US dismisses its critics. No sensible person could ever call Alex Jones a conspiracy theorist!

If Julian Assange were releasing real secrets and not some kind of made-up secrets then he would be dead by now just like Alex Jones and Webster Tarp…oh…hang on!

‘Mate’ is commonplace in the UK, imported from Australia I think, and is generally regarded as a friendly greeting between young men who do not know each other’s names. But, in the same way as using the sobriquet “my friend” when saying something hostile, it becomes patronising. Normally I’d not notice this tone, but you also called me “incurious”, offered to “spoonfeed” me material, and directly implied that I am unintelligent. This approach is not only unnecessary, it’s counterproductive.

But you make a good point about the USS Liberty, and yes, I knew about that attack, although not in the sort of detail you’ve provided. I agree also that the example illustrates how low the Israeli government has sunk in its political machinations.

There are in fact quite a lot of news items that don’t “have legs”; MediaLens drew attention to another one recently, in which it was shown that the Israeli state have been deliberately withholding food from Gaza in order to “put them on a diet”. Just enough so that they don’t die, but not enough so they avoid malnutrition. These were released after their High Court refused to withhold them (from a human rights group) on grounds of national security. Subsequently, no mainstream British newspaper or journal has run a story, except for some tacked-on paragraphs on a BBC article after they were shamed into covering it.

So, the question is, why is our media compliant with the requirements of power?

You say: “I can understand you thinking this [that the media is not instructed what to write] since the stories that the media refuses to touch aren’t real stories at all. Rather they’re crazy conspiracy theories and the media is in fact to be commended for never having looked into them or otherwise given them the time of day.”

You continued: “So! Right you are Jon. The media is a square dealer.”

You have an error of logic here. I said that I didn’t think that the media largely does what it is told, and I stand by that view. That does not mean that I believe the media is a square dealer at all, and I certainly didn’t say that.

The specific logical error is assuming that, if it can be demonstrated that the corporate media act as a propaganda mechanism (which I agree with), they must have been instructed what to cover. In fact, that assumption is the least likely of several possibilities:

* journalists spend a great deal of time in the company of powerful people, and come to psychologically identify with them

* journalists and commentators often have the same political, class or privilege background as politicians or corporate executives, and so are, in the main, more likely to agree with their aims and views than to disagree

* journalists do not want to anger their sources, and so whilst effusive praise is acceptable, disagreement must be muted or euphemistic

* journalists, or their editors, or the owners of a journal, do not want an expensive battle with members of the establishment. For example, if a group of Palestinian militants are referred to as terrorists, it is quite conceivable that some NGOs, progressive groups and their supporters will complain, by writing to the editor, or by cancelling subscriptions. However, if the same paper were to refer to IDF behaviour as terrorist, the powerful Israel lobby would swing into action, thousands of Zionists would start writing letters, and Starbucks might not ever advertise in that paper again. So, a newspaper trying to make money in the first instance is less likely (consciously or otherwise) to take on powerful groups, since it is more expensive to do so.

* journalists’ own bias, from their own economic, nationalist or cultural ideals, gets in the way. For example, even liberal journalists might be a bit sniffy in an article about taxing second home ownership, since journalists operate in a societal strata where second home ownership is both fashionable and desirable. Ditto the thoroughly “even-handed” embedded reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan who occasionally refer to NATO soldiers as “we” or “us”, and the Taliban as “the enemy”, an “infestation”, etc. Ditto the Middle East reporters that refer to the IDF as “soldiers” and “restrained”, whilst calling the Palestinians “terrorist” and “militant”.

I can’t remember from your previous postings whether you’ve read Media Lens or Chomsky and Herman’s “Manufacturing Consent”. If not, they are highly recommended – even if you find yourself in disagreement with them, they suggest a great deal of plausible ways in which error and omission creeps into mainstream discourse.

With all that in mind, how is it that Wikileaks has been feted by the media?

Well, the media is not a singular entity, and arms of it disagrees with the others a lot of the time. Whilst this disagreement is often between members of the ruling classes, sometimes progressive material gets onto the printed page – partly through this process of disagreement, but partly because (believe it or not) there are really reporters out there that believe in good journalism. This irritates the Establishment, to be sure, but on the other hand allows them to reveal the press as ‘free’. Chomsky used to get an occasional op-ed in the NYT, and Pilger used to get a column in the Mirror (now just the New Statesman, with a much reduced readership).

I wonder if the Wikileaks thing would have been reported significantly less if it wasn’t for the US outrage spewed forth from their securitocracy (Craig’s great phrase). With the US establishment providing tacit permission to discuss it, the media were “free” to do so, and significant column inches were then dedicated to calling for Assange’s arrest or assassination, even though no-one asked them to.

I wonder also that, in an atmosphere in which journalists were (nearly) asked not to publish, a sense of rare obstinacy overtook the “left” media, and they went ahead and published anyway. If this is correct (and it is only a guess) then it would cast doubt on the idea that you can pressure newspapers what to write: in the Guardian/NYT’s case, if you apply pressure, they (sometimes) paradoxically do the opposite!

This puts us in an interesting position – given the media are spending a lot of time on the Wikileaks case, a few people are suggestion that Wikileaks must be government propaganda or a disinformation campaign. In fact, for the reasons above, I don’t think that has been shown to the be case at all. As with the Pentagon Papers, the media is now doing a very strange thing indeed: it’s job.

By the way, I had a look into some info tying Assange to the Family cult. All I got was Tarpley and Jones referring to it, without substantiating detail, and Jones was nearly having a heart-attack at the same time as guiding the answers he wanted from Tarpley. They refer to a ‘sex’ cult, when an article from a cult survivor refers to the cult as heavily anti-sex; and the survivor article didn’t mention an MK-ULTRA connection at all. In any case, from Wikipedia it seems that Assange’s mother was married for three years to a cult member, starting from when Julian was eight. It doesn’t seem likely therefore that he was brought up in a cult, nor that he was significantly influenced by it – unless there’s some detail I’ve missed.

I understand that a lot of people have a lot of baggage they bring to the word “feminist” but just try to put that aside for a moment, because it is irrelevant.

It appears the CIA/other insidious forces are slamming Assange with crap charges in order to get people angry, at him. They’re using rape precisely so we’ll back off from defending Assange. That’s the most anti-feminist thing possible! USING a rape charge for this revenge belittles those who have suffered from rape. The very notion of using a b.s. rape charge to further the imperialist, anti-feminist, anti-human agenda of a superpower is appalling. It’s not feminists who are doing this, I assure you.